My Gmail account was hijacked or hacked.

Just last night I went to to log into my Gmail account and kept getting account or password incorrect.

I initially thought, capslock, no joy. Wrong password, of the 5 main passwords I use only two have been used for gmail. At home my password isn’t saved within Firefox, at work it is. I checked this morning and I was entering the correct password.

I’m a fairly cautious PC user. Hardware firewall, antivirus is always up to date, anti add and spyware always up to date, operating system patched and strong passwords. I’m cautious about the addons and executables I use.

So how could this happen? I’m still looking into that and will let you know what I find out.

Following are my suspicions :). My gmail account is firstname.lastname@gmail. I keep getting emails for a person who shares my name. A guy who lives in Scotland his is 1stname’middlenameinitial’lastname (Gmail ignores fullstops in their addresses). I have been his secretary for ages and recently i decided to stop forwarding his emails to his account. Recently he received an important email.

I was wondering whether all my passwords have been compromised but this doesn’t appear to be the case. Of concern was my WOW account and secondarily my bank account. Actually the bank was my primary concern but I couldn’t do anything about it as it was outside business hours.

They all look ok.

I couldn’t get my gmail account back as the associated email address linked to the account was a Yahoo address (i’m proud to say I have never had one). I then had to advise Google that my account had been compromised. They asked me a bunch of questions and activated my work email address as the associated email. Normally there process would have taken 5 days. I got my account back within an hour.

When I went in to update my google info. It turned out I had moved to Scotland :). Thus my suspiscions.

So whilst this case looks to be a harmless identity crisis, I learnt some things.

Ensure that any web based email account you have has an associated email account preferably one from your work or ISP. Mine was my ISP, which I had changed in the mean time. Without this you can loose your web based email account for good.

Without an email account you can rely upon you cannot make changes to your blizzard details other than password. If a keyogger had have gotten my passwords the email account that all of my correspondence associated with my banking and wow accounts would’ve also have been compromised.

A stolen email account would’ve given a hacker an immense amount of information about who I am.

Don’t put yourself through the stress. Makes sure your details for all you web based accounts are up to date, that you have a second email account that you don’t access from you wow computer and that you follow safe computing.

1 It was some one els using something like a key logger. But that doesn’t make sense as all the important passwords haven’t been comprimised. But I have shut down access to bank accounts so unless they are a WOW gold farmer perhaps they no longer have access to the things they wanted access to and i’ve still been compromised.

2 I wondered whether GMail gave this guy access. My associated email account was no longer active. This guy has listed my email address as his for job applications. On websites were he is a sporting training for a national side. Applications with bank accounts. I guessed that if he can make the mistake that many times perhaps he did the same with google when he was trying reinstate his gmail account after he lost his password.

He got it wrong recently with a job application which was forwarded on to him. I received an important email from the national sporting body which I just deleted. Perhaps he was driven to action after missing so many emails that i stopped forwarding.

Really I’m not sure.

It doesn’t make sense. The password I was entering was the correct one. I knew it was at the time but when it fails you question your memory. I confirmed this on my work PC where the password was stored within firefox

What I fail to understand is why they would change residential address details.

I haven’t heard anything from google yet. Other than they investigated my report and have associated my work email with the account.

My gmail account was recently hacked into by someone I know who I am presently in ligitation with. There were all my emails and contacts in there. That person then closed the account. Google has been terrible in trying to get my account restored. First, there is absolutely no human you can talk to. There is a phone operator, but his answer was limited to the following: go on the web and follow the directions we posted.

Well, after filling out a form over and over again, they keep saying that i didn’t provide enough information for them to reinstate the account to me. I even know the day I opened the account 4 years ago. Not enough, there isn’t the usual security questions, rather, they ask, when did you first use their calendar program, their picasso program, etc, etc, All these accoutns are now gone as well. All my photos that I uploaded to the web are gone.

I am distraught and cannot believe that a company that is bigger than the auto makers combined, and US Steel, etc, etc, cannot provide a bit of relief or help.